Episode #141: Modern Business Inefficiencies

Time is life and time is money – we know this, but do we organize ourselves well enough with this in mind.

The disappearance of Executive Assistants and Secretaries reflects the dominance of the keyboard and a DIY approach to work content creation by leaders. Once upon a time, the majority of boss content output was produced by others, a magical time of delegation ruling the world.

Today the boss is the one typing content into a computer keyboard, usually destined to appear in an email, a word document, a powerpoint slide or a spreadsheet. The modern normalisation of the sheer volume of communication ensures the secretarial function is only going to be there for the very upper echelons of large organisations.

The DIY outcome has had a negative knock-on effect, where leaders who should be delegating, have gotten out of the habit and do work they should be delegating to their staff. The delegate muscle has atrophied and become flabby.

Find some handy blunt object and apply it vigorously to your head if you have ever said, “It will be faster if I do it myself”. We all do it, because we are lazy and disorganised. Lazy because we won’t make the effort to set ourselves up for long term success by developing our team members, so that they can step up and take on a higher role. Disorganised because our time management skills are poor and we are unable to schedule the necessary time for the delegation steps, which ultimately will make the process work so well. We are often too busy doing “today” to be able to consider “ultimately”.

Worse than that, we have dangerous self-talk such as, “delegation doesn’t work”. Well, we need to smell the coffee, it does work but not if we do it in some half-baked fashion, missing vital inputs and steps. We have the “don’t delegate enough” leader disease, but we are no longer noticing the symptoms because it has become the new normal to do it by yourself.

When we sit back and evaluate what we actually do all day, everyday, how much of our work-life is being spent on quality time and how much on low value tasks? If the high quality tasks are an infinitesimally small portion of our total work day, what does that tell us about our actual productivity and the potential we have to do a lot better?